GADGET DADDY: Browser comes with bonus: ad-blocking feature

By Lonnie BrownLedger correspondent

Friday

May 6, 2016 at 6:25 PM

You know online advertisers: The ones that pop-up ads that cover up what you want to read on a website until you finally find the "X" to shut the ad-window. The ones that take up chunks of the screen, leaving little space for what you came to see. The ones that flash. The ones that glide across the page.

Chances are that you've never heard of the IAB.

But chances are that you hate its subject matter: It's the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a support group for online advertisers.

You know online advertisers: The ones that pop-up ads that cover up what you want to read on a website until you finally find the "X" to shut the ad-window. The ones that take up chunks of the screen, leaving little space for what you came to see. The ones that flash. The ones that glide across the page.

And the most obnoxious of all: The ones that automatically start playing advertising video and audio — and you have no idea how to turn off the noise.

Did I also mention they eat up data on your cellphone and sloooooow down the loading of websites on your computer's browser? Yes. That, too.

And it can get expensive. The New York Times noted that if a cellphone user visited the home page Boston.com every day for a month, it "would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.”

The IAB has taken note. It had to. The ads were driving users to install ad blockers as add-ons to their web browsers. When ad blockers take over, pages load faster on personal computers and cellphones – in some cases, more than three times faster. In many cases, it loads even faster than that.

So the IAB came up with another acronym: LEAN.

It stands for "Light, Encrypted, Ad-choice driven, Noninvasive ads."

In other words: Everything that many Internet ads lack today.

Last week, the designers of Opera, a web browser, announced it was releasing the latest version of the browser for personal computers and Android phones. It has an ad-blocking feature, and that is what has gotten the attention of the IAB.

Done right, online ads can be useful. If you're searching for a particular item, targeted advertising can be set to pop up on web pages you visit. They can be in the form of helpful videos, but with a "click here to learn more" button instead of automatically starting to play.

With ads blocked, some web pages can load up to 90 percent faster, Opera officials said. "We are the first major browser vendor to integrate an ad-blocking feature, but this development should be no surprise to anyone given the rising popularity of ad-blocking software and even Apple allowing it on its platform," Krystian Kolondra, senior vice president at Opera, wrote in a recent blog.

Kolondra acknowledged that ads have been on the Internet almost from its beginning. But, he added, "In time, though, ads have turned out to be one of the major annoyances of web browsing, and today consumers are working hard to get rid of those annoyances."

Ads are one reason much of the Internet content is free, he said. He noted that Opera officials don't hate ads, but they want the industry to produce ads that don't drag down page-loading times, or try to elude the user when he or she tries to close the ad window.

Opera's browser comes with the ad-blocking feature disabled. It's easy enough to activate from the "settings" or "preferences" menu.

If users have a web page with ads that they like (or ads that behave themselves), that web page can be added to a "whitelist" page so its ads can appear on the page with other text material.

Kolondra said his company is "a business, and has a subsidiary organization called Opera Mediaworks, which does advertising. But, we’re also a consumer brand, and consumers are sending a loud, clear signal to brands and advertisers that the current situation must change."

To download the Opera browser, visit the website: www.opera.com.

I might be wrong, but I bet many of you can't get there fast enough.

— Contact Lonnie Brown at ledgerdatabase@aol.com.

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